Student’s question:
My question is about practicing for pianists. Maybe my ambition is too high, but I really would want to improvise alone on the piano. For instance, for a particular song play the chords and melody divided over two hands, and then have an intermezzo in which my right hand improvises, may be just one note at a time, and the left accompanies. At a certain point in time, both hands resume the song. I guess this kind of improv starts with improvising the accompanying chords, doesn’t it? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
How we think about this in IFR:
I don’t think your ambition is too high at all. You can certainly enjoy improvising alone at the piano. There are infinite ways that both hands can play together on the piano, and I think you’ll naturally use both hands in very creative ways once you’ve built up the foundational skills.
There are a few different layers to the ability you’re describing. What underlies everything is your musical ability. This means your understanding of harmony, your ability to visualize tonal concepts on the keyboard, your personal familiarity with the sounds and your ability to express music with them. This is exactly what IFR will give you, and I encourage you to give yourself completely to the IFR exercises. It’s okay if you’re not able to see right now how this will lead to the ability you ultimately envision. Remember, this is only one layer of your ability.
A second layer of your ability is what we could call your technical skills on the piano. These technical skills are no different for us than they are for any other pianist in the world. So here you can take advantage of the enormous body of teaching that already exists on how to practice scales, arpeggios, chord voicings, etc. None of this is strictly necessary for you to learn the musical abilities that we develop in IFR, but there will come a day when having this technical facility will greatly expand your creative freedom at the piano. So this is another element that I would encourage you to add to your daily music practice.
And then the final layer is about the specific application of improvising solo piano in the style that you’re imagining. Every style of music has its own techniques and devices, giving that style its unique sound. So depending on what kind of music you imagine playing, there might be some specific skills that you could learn that will allow you to create the kinds of sounds you want to play. But you can also improvise your own style purely from your imagination. So this kind of learning may not even be relevant or necessary for you. But if you’re at a loss for how to begin playing solo piano, there are countless courses in the world that teach basic patterns and approaches to solo piano in any style you wish.
What we can do here is develop the most empowering layer of all, which is your relationship with music itself and your understanding of our musical system. For this, it’s actually helpful to play in a much simpler way that allows you to fully appreciate and notice each sound. This could be just improvising melodically with your right hand, or it could involve playing simple accompaniment patterns in your left hand. But I would caution you against trying to overcomplicate the interplay between your two hands. Feel free to be playful and creative, and combine both hands in whatever ways are easy and natural for you. But don’t let your playing become so difficult to manage that you’re no longer learning the musical lessons in the sounds we’re studying.
Also remember that our minds learn on many different levels. For example, one of the best preparations for playing solo piano in the future is to spend lots of time improvising over our backing tracks. Why? How does playing over backing tracks prepare us for making all of that music ourselves on the piano someday? The answer is that when you’re improvising over backing tracks, you’re learning the art of melodic improvisation. You’re learning to tell musical stories with your right hand. And (crucially), on a subconscious level your mind is getting used to what the musical accompaniment should feel like. Even if you don’t realize it, this is an important preparation for playing solo piano in the future because you’re getting to experience so many different moods and textures that will serve you later as inspiration for your own accompaniments.
So for all these reasons, I think a great practice for right now is to really dive deeply into improvising over the IFR Jam Tracks, using your left hand to comp chords and your right hand for melodic soloing. Even though this is not the solo piano activity which is your future goal, practicing in this way will teach you countless musical lessons and it will give you a foundation of clarity for your solo piano vision.
